Question

my query is as follows:

select id,
       date 
  from table 
 where date < '1/31/2015' && date > '11/31/2011'

Answer 1

If you provide the date as a string, some formats will be implicitly/automatically converted to the proper data type of the column being compared. IE:

SELECT t.id,
       t.date
  FROM TABLE t
 WHERE t.date < '2015-01-31'
   AND t.date > '2011-11-31'

The safest means of converting a date/time in a string to a DATETIME is to use the MySQL’s STR_TO_DATE function:

 WHERE t.date < STR_TO_DATE('1/31/2015', '%m/%d/%Y')
   AND t.date > STR_TO_DATE('11/31/2011', '%m/%d/%Y')